Geographically Distributed Software Engineering and Maintenance, a
Challenge for Code Analysis and Empirical Studies
Abstract
The Web will impact software development and maintenance in several
respects. Not only applications will have a Web-based gate, but they will
be developed in a Web-centric environment. Such a geographically
distributed production environment poses new problems to the fields of
configuration management and code analysis. In fact, computation of code
merges and ripple effects will be crucial and automatic support is expected
to be extremely beneficial.
In such a context, several questions remain still unanswered. Some of them
are related to the way code construction and modification will be carried
out. Others refer to potential improvement areas and the role of support
tools. The usability of these tools is another relevant issue. Empirical
studies in software engineering and maintenance have the potential to
provide some of the answers.
Postscript version of the paper.